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Case Studies: Florence Fierenza
Will Durrant in his typical panoramic portrayal, outlines the wonderful connections between the Medici, Amerigo, and the golds tradesmen of Florence.
As uncovered by Italian researcher, "the Professore" spotlights in condensed articulate fashion, an insightful portrait of some Renaissance families.
Research has been ongoing for a number of years regards the Gherardini, and allied lineages. As commonly known, the Mona Lisa or Gioconda was a Gherardini before her marriage.
The Professore has explored the surname forms, derivitive branch lines, and familiy associations, of the time period.
The Professore can be commissioned for research and would be glad to speak with you about your goals.
"The Benign influence of Fra Angelica pased down to Alesso Baldovinetti and Cosimo Roselli, and through Alesso to one of the major painters of the Renaisance: Domenico Ghirlandaio. [Age of the Renaissance page 134-135 by Will Durant].
Domenicos father was a goldsmith who had received the nickname of ghirlanaio from the gold and silver garlands that he fashioned for the pretty heads of Florence.
it sounds like ghirlandaio is close with Medici family; circa 1458; Giovani Tornabuoni chief of the Medici bank in Rome offered him 30 k to paint. Lucrezia Tornabuoni is Lorenzo Medici's mother.
Amerigo Vespucci also was the donor to which ghirlandaio did his art. " -- the Professore
"This is the direct information
pertaining to Ghirlandaio. Directly from
A History of Civilization
The Renaissance
The Golden Age
Chapter VI PAINTING
1. Ghirlandaio"
-- the Professore
[We beleive that Will Durant is in the public domain. -- the editors, Italy Ancestors .com]
Verrocchio's thriving studio was characteristic of Renaissance Florence – it united all the arts in one workshop, sometimes in one man; in the same bottega one artist might be designing a church or a palace, another might be carving or casting a statue, another sketching or painting a picture, another cutting or setting gems, another carving or inlaying ivory or wood, or fusing or beating metal, or fashioning floats and pennons for a festival procession; men like Verrocchio, Leonardo, or Michelangelo could do any of these. Florence had many such studios, and art students went wild in the streets, or lived Bohemianly in the tenements, or became rich men honored by popes and princes as inspired spirits beyond price and - like Cellini – above the law. More than any other city except Athens, Florence attached importance to art and artists, talked and fought about them, and told anecdotes about them, as we do now of actors and actresses. It was Renaissance Florence that formed the romantic concept of the genius – the man inspired by a divine spirit (the Latin genius) dwelling within him.
It is worthy of note that Verrocchio's studio left no great sculptor (except one side of Leonardo) to carry on the master's excellence, but taught two painters of high degree – Leonardo and Perugino – and one of lesser but notable talent, Lorenzo di Credi. Painting was gradually ousting sculpture as the favorite art. Probably it was an advantage that the painters were uninstructed and uninhibited by the lost murals of antiquity. They knew that there had been such men as Apelles and Protogenes, but few of them saw even the Alexandrian or Pompeian remnants of ancient painting. In this art there was no revival of antiquity, and the continuity of the Middle Ages with the Renaissance was most visible: the line was devious but clear from the Byzantines to Duccio to Giotto to Fra Angelico to Leonardo to Raphael to Titian. So the painters, unlike the sculptors, had to forge through trail and error their own technology and style; originality and experiment were forced upon them. They labored over the details of human, animal, and plant anatomy; they tried circular, triangular, or other schemes of composition; they explored the tricks of perspective and the illusions of chiaroscuro to give depth to their bakgrounds and body to their figures; they scoured the streets for Apostles and Virgins, and drew from models clothed or nude; they passed from fresco to tempera and back again, and appropriated the new techniques of oil painting introduced into northern Italy by Rogier van der Weyden and Antonio da Messia. As their skill and courage grew, and their lay patrons multiplied, they added to the old religious subjects the stories of classic mythology and the pagan glories of the flesh. They took Nature into the studio, or betook themselves to Nature; nothing human or natural seemed in their view alien to art, no face so ugly but art could reveal its illuminating significance. They recorded the world; and when war and politics had made Italy a prison and a ruin, the painters left behind them the line and color, the life and passion, of the Renaissance.
Formed by such studies, inheriting an ever richer tradition of methods, materials, and ideas, men of talent painted better now than men of genius had painted a century before. Benozzo Gozzoli, says Vasari in an ungracious moment, “was not of great excellence . . . yet he distanced all the others of his age in his perseverance; for among the multitude of his works some could hardly help but be good. He began as a pupil of Fra Angelico, and followed him to Rome and Orvieto as assistant. Piero the Gouty recalled him to Florence and invited him to portray, on the walls of the chapel in the Medici Palace, the journey of the Magi from the East to Bethlehem. These frescoes are Benozzo's chef-d'oeuvre: a stately and yet lively procession of kings and knights in gorgeous robes, of squires, pages, angels, hunters, scholars, slaves, horses, leopards, dogs, and half a dozen Medici – and Benozzo went to San Gimignano, and decorated the choir of Sant'Agostino with seventeen scenes from the life of its patron saint. In the Campo Santo at Pisa he labored for sixteen years, covering vast walls with twenty-one Old Testament scenes from Adam to the Queen of Sheba; some, like The Tower of Babel, were among the major frescoes of the Renaissance. Benozzo diluted his excellence through eager haste; he drew carelessly, made many of his figures depressingly uniform, and crowded his pictures with a confusing multitude of persons and details; but he had in him the blood and joy of life, he loved its lusty panorama and the glory of the great; and the imperfections of his line are half forgotten in the splendor of his color and the enthusiasm of his fertility.
The benign influence of Fra Angelico passed down to Alesso Baldovinetti and Cosimo Roselli, and through Alesso to one of the major painters of the Renaissance – Domenico Ghirlandaio. Domenico's father was a goldsmith who had received the nickname of Ghirlandaio from the gold and silver garlands that he had fashioned for the pretty heads of Florence. Under this father and Baldovinetti Domenico studied with zest and zeal; spent many hours before the frescoes of Masaccio in the Carmine; learned by indefatigable practice the arts of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and composition; “he would draw everyone who passed the shop,” says Vasari, “making extraordinary likenesses” after a fleeting view. He was barely twenty-one when he was charged to paint the story of Santa Fina in her chapel in the cathedral at San Gimignano. At thirty-one (1480) he earned the title of master by four frescoes in the church and refectory of the Ognissanti in Florence – St. Jerome, a Descent From the Cross, a Madonna della Misericordia (which included a portrait of the donor, Amerigo Vespucci), and a Last Supper that gave some hints to Leonardo.
Summoned to Rome by Sixtus IV, he painted in the Sistine Chapel Christ Calling Peter and Andrew from Their Nets – especially beautiful in its background of mountains, sea, and sky. During this stay in Rome he studied and drew the arches, baths, columns, acqueducts, and amphitheaters of the ancient city, and with so practiced an eye that he was able to seize at once, without rule or compass, the just proportions of each part. A Florentine merchant in Rome, Francesco Tornabuoni, mourning his dead wife, employed Ghirlandaio to paint frescoes for her memorial in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and Domenico succeeded so well that Tornabuoni sent him back to Florence armed with florins and a letter attesting his excellence. The Signory soon entrusted to him the decoration of the Sala del Orologio in their palace. In the next four years (1481-5) he painted scenes from the life of St. Francis in the Sassetti Chapel of Santa Trinita. All the progress of the painter's art, except the use of oil, was embodied in these frescoes: harmonious composition, accurate line, gradations of light, perspective fidelity, realistic portraiture (of Lorenzo, Politian, Pulci, Palla Strozzi, Francesco Sassetti), and at the same time the Angelesque tradition of ideality and piety. From the near-perfection of the altarpiece – the Adoration of the Shepherds – there would be but a step of deeper imagination and subtler grace to Leonardo and Raphael.
In 1485 Giovanni Tornabuoni, chief of the Medici bank in Rome, offered Ghirlandaio twelve hundred ducats ($30,000) to paint a chapel in Santa Maria Novella, and promised him two hundred more if the work should prove fully satisfactory. Aided by several pupils, including Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio gave most of the following five years to this high moment of his career. On the ceiling he painted the four Evangelists; on the walls St. Francis, peter Martyr, John the Baptist, and scenes from the lives of Mary and Chist, from an Annunciation to a magnificent Coronation of Lodovica Tornabuoni, fit to be a queen, the saucy beauty of Ginevra de' Benci, the scholars Ficino, Politian, and Landino, the painters Baldovinetti, Mainardi, and Ghirlandaio himself. When, in 1490, the chapel was opened to the public, all the dignitaries and literati of Florence flocked to examine the paintings; the realistic portraits were the talk of the town; and Tornabuoni expressed himself as completely satisfied. Financially pressed at the time, he begged Domenico to forgive him the extra two hundred ducats; the artist replied that the satisfaction of his patron was more precious to him than any gold.
He was a lovable character, so adored by his brothers that one of them, David, almost slew an abbot with an aged loaf of bread for bringing to Domenico and his aides food that David held unworthy of his brother's genius. Ghirlandaio opened his studio to all who cared to work or study there, making it a veritable school of art. He accepted all commissions, great or small, saying that none should be denied; he left the care of his household and finances to David, saying that he would not be content till he had painted the whole circuit of Florence's wall. He produced many mediocre paintings, and yet some incidental pieces of great charm, like the Louvre's delightful Grandfather with the bulbous nose, and the lovely Portrait of a Woman in the Morgan Collection in New York – pictures full of the character that year by year records itself upon the human face. Great critics of unquestionable learning and repute yield him only a minor rank; and it is true that he excelled rather in line than in color, that he painted too rapidly, and crowded his pictures with irrelevant detail, and took a step backward, perhaps, in preferring tempera after Baldovinetti's experiments with oil. Even so, he brought the accumulated technology of his art to the highest point that it would reach in his country and his century; and he bequeathed to Florence and the world such treasures that criticism hangs its head in gratitude.
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